A year ago, kayaker Traci Lynn Martin set off from Lighthouse Beach in Port Huron on an epic journey that would take her around three of the five Great Lakes.

The Kansas City, Missouri, resident is coming back to Port Huron at 7 p.m. April 20 to share her experiences and to talk about her plans to try again in 2020 to circumnavigate all the lakes.

The presentation, which will include photos and a question-and-answer session, will be in the Donald Dodge Auditorium at the St. Clair County Administration Building, 200 Grand River Ave., Port Huron. Admission is free. It is being sponsored by the Yak-Abouts kayaking group.

"The kayaking group up there, they were very helpful and I made a lot of friends in the group," Martin said. "They invited me to come back and give a presentation about my 10 months on the Great Lakes."

Martin's quest, which started in Port Huron in March 2017, ended in December with winter closing in on Lake Ontario near Toronto. She had paddled 3,582 miles and became the first person to circumnavigate lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron in a calendar year in a kayak.

"I completely circumnavigated the three largest lakes in North America, which had never been done before in one year by a single person," she said.

She said she was able to paddle the southern shore of Lake Erie and walked her kayak 13 miles around Niagara Falls.

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Traci Lynn Martin pulls her kayak into Lake Huron as she launches at Lighthouse Beach in Port Huron(Photo: MARK R. RUMMEL, TIMES HERALD)

"At Toronto, I had to stop because of the snow and the ice," she said.

Bad weather on Lake Erie also delayed her.

"It was pretty feisty," Martin said. "Lake Erie was the most challenging."

If Lake Erie was the most challenging, Lake Superior was the most everything else.

"The significance of the name is, with my rheumatoid arthritis it is sometimes challenging to stay in the kayak," she said. "I would play a mental game and say, 'I just have to get to the next point, I just have to get to the next point.'"

She said she will not only be sharing images from the journey and her experiences, but also what people would need to to set out on a kayak trip around the lakes.

"I was 240 miles short of the world record (for most miles paddled in a year)," she said. "The world record was set by a 30-something healthy individual from South Africa."

She said she intends to get that world record in 2020.

"I’m going to be more smart about it and efficient about it, and my goal is to get that world record and in the process of getting that world record, circumnavigate all five lakes," she said.

Contact Bob Gross at (810) 989-6263 or rgross@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @RobertGross477.

If you go

Kayaker Traci Lynn Martin will give a presentation about her trip through the Great Lakes at 7 p.m. April 20 at the Donald Dodge Auditorium in the St. Clair County Administration Building, 200 Grand River Ave., Port Huron.